Holy Cross Sunday
Numbers 21:4b-9; 1 Corinthians 1:18-24; John 3:13-17
When you’ve been married almost 33 years and you work with your spouse 24/7 and the children are grown and gone, dinner conversation can get a bit thin. So it was that Thursday night, inspired by the texts that we encounter in today’s lessons and talking about sermon preparation, Doug and I decided to write a book. The book would be a work of historical fiction and would be based on the life of St.Helena. Helen was Emperor Constantine’s mother. Constantine was of course Roman Emperor from 306- 337 In 313 he publicly accepted Christianity thus ending the long era of the persecution of Christians by the Roman state. Helena is thought to have always been a Christian. When her son publicly avowed the faith, she, at the tender age of 70 plus, took off for the Holy Land to find and protect the sacred sites of Jesus life. What a story such a formidable woman would make. One can well imagine the dispatches from Helen to Constantine. “Son, please send money, materials and artisans, I’ve found the place where Jesus was born and we’re building a church.” No son can long deny their mother but one can imagine the frustration when she kept finding more and more sites, “Mother please, there is a limit.” So it was that in the construction of a basilica over the spot where Jesus was said to have been buried Helena is said to have found the cross on which Jesus was crucified. Commemorating that event begets the special observance of Holy Cross day which has been consistently celebrated in the church on September 14th since the mid 600’s, through the Reformation and on to the church of today. It is I believe the only special commemorative day for an object, an object unlike any other. A symbol that points beyond itself to encapsulate our most cherished beliefs and understandings about Christianity.
I remember as a teenager attending a youth retreat at a camp in Wisconsin. A charismatic retreat leader named Josh who by his vitality and enthusiasm holds us all in the palm of his hand. We listen to him, absorb what he says…and what he’s talking about is the cross. Don’t we understand, he asks us? Don’t we understand that the cross is a symbol of torture and death? Don’t we understand that this is powerful testimony to the horror of Jesus’ death, to an execution of an innocent human being? The cross is our shame for our part in denying Jesus for being the people who will not defend this innocent. Why, he says, we might just as well be putting an electric chair or a rope and a noose above our altars. The cross is a powerful reminder of Jesus suffering. We should not, Josh says take wearing the cross lightly. For years after I disdained those who would use the cross to decorate their ears as earrings or hold their sleeves together with cross cufflinks. Such is the influence a dynamic leader can have on impressionable minds.
Much as I applaud Josh for getting a group of otherwise distracted adolescents to think I’m afraid he didn’t quite have it or at least he had only the lesser important part of an understanding. The cross is a powerful symbol alright not of our shame but of God’s love. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son.” For God so loved the world. It’s all about where you put the emphasis.
The story is told of a woman who went in to a jewelry store and asked to see a cross necklace. The man behind the counter asked “Do you want a plain one or one with the little man on it.” You won’t find many protestant churches with crosses with the little man on it because we want to put the emphasis not on our sinfulness and shame and guilt but on God’s continuing, ever present, overwhelming love and grace. It was on that cross that Jesus implored “Father forgive them.” And that empty cross is the assurance that God has.
Phyllis Tickle is a great story teller. She reminds us that when the children of Israel had been wandering in the wilderness for some thirty nine years and most of the original whiners and complainers were gone “Moses, along with Joshua and Caleb, began to lead their children’s children back toward the Promised Land. But like their progenitors, the men and women of this second generation began also to doubt and complain. They said things like, "Let us go back to Egypt. At least there we were fed, had homes we could live in one place." They said also, "Who of us has seen God? To which of us has he spoken? Who among us can say he or she believes all the tales our fathers and mothers left us? Who?"
And the wrath of Yahweh lashed out against them again. This time, the story says, Yahweh sent snakes into the camps. There were droves of snakes moving through the camp of the Children's children…snakes in the tents, snakes in the breadbaskets and the cooking pots, snakes in the bedrolls and snakes in the cribs. Then Moses, falling on his knees, petitioned God's mercy on the Children. God told Moses then to take a consecrated brass vessel at the door of the Tent of Meeting and hammer it quickly into the image of the serpents that were attacking the Children's children. Moses did and he wound the brass snake around the crosspiece of his staff and then he ran through the camp, holding the staff aloft and calling out to the people in the throes of their agony, "Look up! Look up and be saved! Look up! Look up and be saved!"
And the Bible says that those who believed Moses, those who stopped looking down at the snakes, who stopped trying to pull them off of themselves and their children, but looked up instead at the brass snake…those men and women did not die, but they were saved. This does not mean that they were not bitten, but simply that those who looked up and not down did not die of their wounds. Eighteen months later, it was these men and women who saw the Jordan part before them and who walked across its dry bed to claim the land of milk and honey promised them by God.
It's a good story, in fact, a very impressive story. And what the story recognizes is that all of us are going to be bitten—painfully bitten—in this life. Most of us learn that truth fairly quickly just from experience. But, according to the story, it is not the being bitten that we in this imperfect world can do anything about; it is only the how we respond to being bitten that we can control. When we look up, usually we are saved by that very act of faith for it is when we look down and struggle with what is tormenting us that we most often empower it by the very attention we are going to give it.” (Phyllis Tickle"A Serpent in the Desert" 30 Minutes Program #4906 First broadcast November 6, 2005)
Nicodemus comes to Jesus in the dead of night looking for answers. And Jesus reaches far back into the holy history that Nicodemus would have cut his teeth on to tell him that he Jesus is the one, the embodiment of God’s abundant love. That he will be lifted up and if we but look on him we will have life. 14And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. 16For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
And so today, this Holy Cross day, we lift high the cross and the love of Christ proclaim.
Amen